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ING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 



DISCOURSE 



PREACHED IN THE 



BOWDOIN-SQUARE CHURCH, 



BOSTON 



SABBATH EVENING, JULY 4. 1858. 



BY JOHN N. MURDOCH, D.I). 



BOSTON: 
JOHN r . J E W E T T AND COMPANY, 

CLEVELAND, OHIO : 

HENRY p. B. .TEWKTT. 
18 5 8. 



4- 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

A FOURTH OF JULY DISCOURSE. 

BY JOHN N. MURDOCK, D.D. 



This day commemorates the epoch of our 
National History. It is the political birth-day of a 
great people. If we keep days for kings, heroes, 
v^ sages and statesmen, it is proper that we should 
s^ observe, in some becoming way, the anniversary of 
^ a Nation's Exodus from vassalage and dependence. 
\ Let this day be honored, by due observance, in all 
^ time to come. I have invited you to this place 
•t to-night, in deference to its claims. It is not my 
^"^ purpose, however, to rehearse the history of which 
it is the luminous centre : I propose rather to deal 
with the truths which it signalizes, viewing them 
somewhat from their point of contrast with those 
errors and perversions of the time, which threaten 
to rob the day of its only true significance. I have 
selected, as serving my present occasion, by afford- 
ing a proper starting point for the remarks I wish 
to make, those words of our Lord found in Luke 
xi. 47, 48. 

" Woe unto you : for ye build the sepulchres of the Prophets, and 
your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the 
deeds of your fathers, for they indeed killed them and ye build 
their sepulchres." 

"Was it wrong, then, for the Jews of Christ's 
day to show their reverence for the prophets whom 
their fathers had unjustly killed? Did they not, 
in the act which our Lord attributes to them, vin- 
dicate the slain prophets, and condemn the men 
who murdered them ? Was it not praiseworthy in 
1 (1) 



2 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

that generation to erect the martyr's memorial to 
those servants of God whom former generations 
had wickedly slain ? Was it not like going back- 
ward to cover the shame of the fathers wdth the 
mantle of atonement? Was it not a just and 
honorable sentiment which prom'pted them to 
say — " If we had been in the days of om* fathers 
we would not have been partakers with them in the 
blood of the prophets ? " * How then could it be 
unworthy for them to build the sepulchres of the 
martyrs whom their fathers slew, and what is the 
reason of the woe denounced against them by the 
Son of Man? 

The crime of the Jews did not consist in sym- 
pathy and veneration for the dead, but rather in 
hatred to the living prophets. They saw how 
wrong it was in their fathers to persecute and slay 
the prophets of old, yet they were ready to copy 
the very crime v/hich they were so prompt to con- 
demn. At that very moment they were thirsting 
for the blood of a greater than the greatest of the 
ancient prophets, and plotting to compass his 
death. Such is the fatal aptitude of those who are 
quick to detect the sin of others, in blinding them- 
selves to their own. These men were, in reality, 
only perfecting their fathers' crime, and fihing up 
the measure of that national guilt which the former 
but commenced. The fathers slew the servants of 
God, and the children perpetuated their spirit, 
though assuming to repudiate and condemn their 
deeds. This was the crime of the Jews of our 
Lord's time ; a crime amplified and refined by the 
hypocrisy which informed it. 

The text and the history to which it refers afford 
a lesson for us as a people. We condemn the 
Jews whom our Lord rebuked, as they condemned 
their fathers. We wonder at their blindness, and 

* Matt. 23 : 30 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 3 

execrate their insane malice towards the Son of 
Man. We marvel that men who lavished such 
costly mourning on the slain prophets of a former 
day, should be found cementing the monuments of 
the dead, with the innocent blood of the living. 
Yet if I do not misread the spirit of our time, and 
misinterpret the course of events in our country, 
we are not unlike them, in that we imitate what 
we condemn, doing the very things which we are 
so prompt and earnest to denounce in others. We 
censure the men who denied freedom of conscience 
to our Puritan fathers ; yet all over the land we 
make organized attempts to punish a particular 
ecclesiastical connection with civil disabilities ; 
thus restricting portions of our people in the free 
enjoyment of a great and indefeasible right; as if 
the rights of conscience were not as broad and 
sacred in the Catholic as in the Protestant. Thus 
while we glorify the Puritan's resistance of wrong, 
we range ourselves on the side of the Puritan's 
oppressor. Moreover, we execrate the acts of those 
rulers who goaded our revolutionary fathers to 
resistance ; yet, either as principals or accessories, 
we are inflicting greater injustice on a province of 
our own country, seeking by the bands of power to 
fasten an oppressive yoke on the necks of thous- 
ands of our own brethren. We venerate the men 
who, in the day that tried men's souls, dared to do 
or die, but we denounce their living representa- 
tives. We build monuments to the dead prophets 
of freedom, while, by our injustice or indifference, 
we are adding to the immortal roll of our country's 
martyrs. It becomes us then, on this occasion, to 
inquire in what respects the text suggests parallels 
in the history and spirit of our country, and to find 
how we are to apply the lessons of warning which 
it presents with such solemn emphasis. 

I. Consider, in the first place, how much it is 



4 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

the habit of our people to condemn and malign 
the living, for what they admire and commend in 
the dead. We honor the dead prophet, while the 
living, who walks in the same path, and speaks 
from the same inspiration, is stoned. We sing 
the praises of the ascended Elijahs, and hoot the 
lingering Elishas on whose shoulders the mantles 
of the former have fallen. The noble men of old, 
who rebuked the wrong, and resisted the injustice 
of their time, are canonized ; while those who de- 
nounce the wrong and trample on the injustice of 
to-day, are pelted with abuse, and smeared with 
obloquy. Let a man stand up in these times for 
those human rights which our fathers proclaimed 
as imprescriptible and universal, only reechoing 
the words in which they asserted, and duplicating 
the' deeds by which they vindicated them, and the 
magnates who wield the reins of power, and the 
rabble whom they hold in their leash, will cry out, 
with one voice, " Away with him I " He who 
dares, in this degenerate age, to earn the honor 
accorded to the patriotism of Franklin, will be 
very likely to be rewarded with the anathemas 
which have been vented against the treachery of 
Arnold. We embellish our public squares and 
monumental grounds, with statuary in honor of 
the sages and heroes of our earlier and better his- 
tory, without any just appreciation of the spirit 
which animated them, or the great ends for which 
they struggled and bled ; though, in sober sooth, 
the truth of nature is sometimes vindicated in 
spite of ourselves, in those pitiful travesties of art 
which fitly symbolize, not the glory of a former 
age, but the simulated and maudlin patriotism of 
the present. We rear an imperial monument in 
the national capital to the memory of the purest 
and best among the dead prophets of freedom; 
yet, beneath its very shadow, his living representa- 
tives may be stigmatized as incendiaries, or beaten 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 5 

to the earth with ruffian rage and murderous blud- 
geon. If that incongruous pile should ever be 
com])leted, there would be a measure of poetic 
justice in the consummation ; for it would signal- 
ize, not the glorious name it bears, but the distort- 
ing prejudices and belittling animosities of the 
age in which it was reared, and the degenerate 
souls of the men who conceived and executed it. 
It is fit that a generation w^hich represents the 
principles of Washington by such deeds, should 
be doomed to commemorate his fame by such a 
monum.ent! 

For what, let me ask, do we honor the early 
fathers of our Republic ? Is it merely for the per- 
gonal qualities which they displayed ; for physical 
endurance, or mental fortitude ; for personal cour- 
age, or political sagacity? Is it not rather for 
those great principles of justice, equality, and free- 
dom which they asserted with such emphasis, and 
vindicated with such devotedness of purpose and 
life ? They proclaimed the natural and inalienable 
right of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness. They set up the privileges of the 
people, as above and before the prerogatives of 
government; declaring that the only authority of 
the latter, is derived from the consent of the former. 
When Power ignored these principles, and in- 
fringed on these rights, they resisted its aggres- 
sions. They refused to bear the burdens of a 
government whose policy they were denied a voice 
in shaping, asserting the right of immediate repre- 
sentation in the National Legislature. They vin- 
dicated the privileges of their citizenship, and the 
claims of their manhood. They submitted to 
obloquy and reproach, they incurred danger and 
braved death, to secure these rights and privileges 
for themselves and their posterity. These are the 
things which entitle them to be remembered by 
succeeding generations, insuring them an enduring 
1^ 



6 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

fame. These are the principles and deeds which 
our orators embalm in eloquence, and our poets 
commemorate in song. But how do we regard 
those who follow in the footsteps of these glorious 
men of old ? There are still men in our national 
councils, who have not forgotten the lessons of the 
Fathers, who are not afraid to imitate their noble 
example, and who, in season, and out of season, 
maintain the principles which they proclaimed, 
and sealed with their blood. What do we say of 
these, our living prophets ? Do we not stigmatize 
them as " fanatics," or brand them as " rebels ? " 
Do we not cover them with foul epithets ? Have 
we not attempted to awe them with menaces, or 
to silence them with blows ? Have we not done 
all that supreme power, unscrupulously exercised, 
could effect, to stifle the voice of a part of our 
people, or crush them out ? Have we not mnzzled 
their presses by mob violence ? Have we not bat- 
tered their houses with cannon, and burned them 
with fire? Have v/e not allowed them to be 
hunted, as if they were wolves or beasts of prey ? 
Have we not denied them the blessings of peace, 
and the fruits of industry ? Have we not insisted 
that they shall renounce their rights as citizens, or 
become martyrs to them ? Have we not allowed 
them to be arrested without accusation, dragged 
from their homes, and shot down in cold blood ? 
Thus even wdiile we magnify the merits of our 
dead patriots, we persecute and slay those of our 
own time. Thus we perpetuate and repeat the 
crime of the old oppressors, condemning acts in 
them, which we allow in ourselves, and praising 
those acts in the dead, for which we are willing to 
see the living impaled. For we must not forget 
that what has been done by our government, has 
been done by us ; that we are responsible for the 
evil which we knew, and did not our utmost to 
avert. If these things have been, and our devotion 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 7 

to party has blinded us as to their reality, or made 
us insensible of their enormity ; if such crimes 
against freedom, and the rights of man, have been 
suffered to pass without rebuke, through our tim- 
idity or indifference, the stain of innocent blood is 
upon us, and we are covered with the stigma of 
an indelible disgrace. We have built the tombs 
of the prophets, as the continuators of the injus- 
tice which consigned them to death ; not in vindi- 
cation of their memories, nor out of fealty to the 
principles in which they lived, and for which they 
died. 

11. I ask you to consider, in the second place, 
that, in spite of the avowed reverence which is so 
generally professed for the patriots and heroes of 
our earlier history, there is a very marked and 
wide, if not general, repudiation of the principles 
which they maintained, both by pen and sword, 
and embodied in the institutions which they have 
transmitted to us. Quite too many among us, 
separate the men from their principles, pretending 
to venerate the one, while they scout and discard 
the other. There are thousands who are loud in 
their eulogium of Washington, who yet ridicule 
those religious convictions, and look with scorn on 
that love of impartial freedom, and that regard for 
human rights, which led him to make provision for 
the manumission of his slaves. There are thou- 
sands who acknowledge Jefferson as the apostle of 
the political theories in which they have been 
reared, who yet scout his immortal axiom, which 
constitutes the only rational ground of those theo- 
ries; namely, that " all men are created equal, and 
are endowed by their creator with certain inalien- 
able rights, among which are life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness." There are too many, alas I 
who, while they exult in the great truth of the 
Fatherhood of God, forget, or practically deny, 



8 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

that He hath " made of one blood all nations of 
men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth." 
Our people generally profess to glory in the doc- 
trines, the spirit, and the deeds, of the Revolutionary 
Fathers ; yet our government, in this very year of 
grace, denies the great theory, which they so broadly 
asserted, that it is the right of the people to elect 
their own representatives, set up their own consti- 
tutions, and enact their own laws. We have seen 
the whole patronage of our national administration, 
and all the appliances of a gigantic political power, 
exerted, both in the way of corruption and of 
terror, to defeat or to force the will of a free peo- 
ple, in respect to the fundamental law under which 
they are to live. The names of Washington and 
Jefferson are invoked to sanctify a course, and to 
justify a measure, from which their great souls 
would have shrunk with loathing and ineffable 
scorn. The fathers believed that human bondage 
was a wrong and a curse, both to the master and 
the slave, and they labored earnestly, and prayed 
fervently, for its eradication from our soil. But, 
while those who are more immediately involved in 
this terrible evil, assume to honor their memories, 
they do, in this most vital respect, repudiate their 
faith. Instead of curtailing slavery, they seek to 
give it wider scope. Instead of laboring for its 
extinction, they aim to make it perpetual. They 
have renounced the humane and just ideas of the 
men whose names and deeds they make their 
boast, giving themselves up to the claims of inter- 
est, or suffering themselves to be swayed by the 
impulse of a blind prejudice. They assume to rever- 
ence the memory of the brave men of old, who 
asserted the great rights of humanity, making them 
good against all comers ; but they discard those 
principles of universal and impartial freedom, 
which those men maintained in spite of the parch- 
ments of parliaments, and the bayonets of kings. 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 9 

It is a truth to which the history of this coun- 
try bears abundant and mournful testimony, that 
our political institutions are well nigh emptied of 
the spirit which the fathers breathed into them ; 
that the broad foundation of popular rights on 
which they reared the superstructure of our gov- 
ernment, is well nigh destroyed; and we have 
stood by, tacitly consenting to the foul desecration 
of what was meant to be forever sacred to free- 
dom, if, indeed, we have not held the stained 
garments of those who have been active in the 
WTong. Human liberty was the object of the 
fathers' devotion, but we have tamely seen her 
degraded and her rights repudiated. They set her 
in the highest niche of the temple of our republi- 
can state, but we have seen her first bound, and 
then cast forth into the streets. We have despised 
freedom, which is the chief jewel in the crown of 
our glory. We have discarded the seminal princi- 
ple of our political and social state. We have 
rejected the great life elements of our democratic 
polity ; the perfect equality of all men before the 
law, and the right of all men to the free use of 
their proper faculties, in any sphere which Provi- 
dence may open to them, until they forfeit that 
right by crime. These doctrines of our fathers we 
have already repudiated in practice, and we are 
beginning to question them as theories. But a few 
months since I heard a gentleman of most amiable 
character, and of highly respectable attainments, 
then and now holding a responsible office under 
(he national government, deprecating the humane 
impulses by which Mr. Jefferson's theories of gov- 
ernment were colored, and by which his political 
course was so strongly influenced, though he 
allowed the wisdom of the great statesman in all 
other respects. This man does not stand alone. 
A greater and more eloquent man, also a native of 
New England, whose name has become a house- 



10 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

hold word in the city of his adoption, may tell yon, 
to-morrow, if he choose to repeat, oh such an 
occasion, what he has deUberately said before, that 
the declaration of human rights, which is made 
the basis of the Declaration of American Inde]~>en- 
dence, is only a tissue " of glittering generalities," 
mere rhetorical flourishes, instead of substantial 
and immortal truths. Thus the political disciples 
of the Sage of Monticello, are coming openly to 
repudiate his theories of freedom and haman rights. 
They are beginning to set up the privileges of race 
and class, against the rights of man ; thus sweep- 
ing away the grand idea of the equality of men in 
respect of natural rights, which constituted the 
basis of his political philosophy. Such views are 
utterly incompatible with impartial freedom, and 
with the principles on which our government is 
professedly grounded. 

The fathers of the Republic were wise enough 
to make the Constitution under which they organ- 
ized it declare the intent for which it was framed 
and put into operation. It expressly declares that 
it was " ordained to establish justice, promote the 
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty 
for themselves and their posterity." These words 
at least are left, and there can be no reasonable 
doubt as to their meaning. Yet, a few years since, 
I heard the foremost man of ah New England 
declare that this government had nothing to do 
with the rights of men, or individual security, but 
was meant chiefly to facilitate the intercourse of 
the people, and subserve the ends of commerce. 
I give the substance of his remark ; his words are 
on record, and, I believe, are to be found in his 
published works. Thus wealth is set up above 
man, and commerce is regarded as a greater inter- 
est than humanity. This is an utter reversal of 
the ideas of the fathers ; by the very men, too, who 
laud their names, and assume to venerate their 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 11 

memories. Nor is this new interpretation of the 
objects of the constitution personal or accidental 
merely. It has come to be an authorized construc- 
tion, and an established policy; the government 
having actually been made to take this new direc- 
tion. Not only must the most sacred privileges of 
one man give way to the interests of another ; but 
conviction, conscience, sympathy and humanity 
must be crushed down, to smooth the way for the 
material interests of the country. Men talk much 
of their love for the Union of these States ; but if 
you sift and carefully weigh the expressions which 
are so much on their lips, you shall find that this 
popular attachment to the Union, springs, not 
from love of liberty, and sentiments of human 
brotherhood, but from the mere love of national 
wealth, power, and greatness. Men love the Union 
because it exalts the State, and aggrandizes 
national importance ; not because it magnifies man, 
and secures his rights. 

The highest tribunal under our government has 
recently assumed grounds which subvert the great 
popular principles so clearly recognized in the 
Constitution. I do not allude now to the mon- 
strous claim that, instead of being the safeguard 
of freedom, the Constitution was intended to open 
the way, and cover the march, of chattel slavery 
over our public domain ; I refer rather to the formal 
denial of the truth, regarded by the fathers as self- 
evident, that all men are created equal in respect 
of fundamental rights. That august court, which 
has stood so high in the respect and veneration of 
cur people, has solemnly proclaimed that it is not 
the design of our Federal Constitution to recog- 
nize the rights of man, as man ; but that it was 
meant simply to secure the rights of the dominant 
race, more properly, perhaps, to fortify the privi- 
leges of a small portion of that race. This re- 
markable fulmination is most significant and mo- 



12 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

mentous, not only sti'iking at the hopes of the 
black man, but threatening the dearest rights of 
the white man, as well. For be it remembered, 
that, when humanity ceases to be sacred, and 
manhood cannot insure protection of person and 
personal rights, the real safeguard of liberty is 
gone, and we are exposed to whatever encroach- 
ment the interests of the dominant class, or the 
exigencies of party, may demand. Taking the 
theories put forth by our public functionaries, and 
the action of successive administrations, as expo- 
nents of our national policy, it would seem that 
nothing is regarded as sacred, except the single 
interest of property in human flesh. This gi'eat 
government puts forth all its power, increasing its 
police to millions, to remand one rational chattel 
to his chains, and the use and behoof of his mas- 
ter ; but what has it done to repress the outrages, 
or punish the wholesale robberies and murders 
which have been practised against men whose 
only crime is, that they deny both the expediency 
and the rightfulness of human bondage ? There is 
a fearful commentary on the spirit of a large por- 
tion of our people, (that portion of them which 
seems to share the chief sympathies of the national 
government,) in a paragraph which I read a day 
or two since in one of our public journals, em- 
bracing a statement of the venerable Mr. Hair- 
grove, formerly of Georgia, and one of the victims 
of the late murderous outrage of Hamilton and 
his party, in Kansas. Speaking of a four years' 
residence in Monroe county, Mississippi, Mr. Hair- 
grove says that, during that short period, "thirty- 
six murders were committed ; and yet no man was 
ever punished for murder or manslaughter. In 
fact," he adds, " you may commit any crime under 
heaven there, without fear of punishment, except 
one. You may assault, stab, shoot, kill, as much 
as you please, without much danger; but you 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 13 

must not tamper with slaves. They seldom pun- 
ish anybody for crimes against a white man, but 
they will lynch half a dozen white men, for steal- 
ing one negro." This picture may seem over-col- 
ored, but I believe it is substantially just. It is 
only reasonable to expect that human life will be 
held cheap, where human liberty is disregarded. 
Where the rights of man are ignored, and property 
in man is the only vital thing, these things must 
follow, as the shadow follows its body. And the 
national government, both in its laws and admin- 
istration, seems to have adopted substantially the 
same economic policy. All other interests, indus- 
try, property, liberty, even life itself, appear to be 
regarded as trivial, in comparison with the as- 
sumed right of man to hold property in man. I 
would prosecute no unreasoning crusade against 
those who are unfortunately involved in the evils 
of slavery ; but when this institution is assumed 
as the key-stone of our government, and every 
other interest is construed in subordination to it, I 
insist that the principles of (he Fathers of the Re- 
public are abandoned, that the Constitution is per- 
verted to uses which it never contemplated. 

Thus the noble instrument which our Fathers 
ordained to establish justice, promote the general 
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to all 
generations, has become practically obsolete. Ac- 
cording to the new theory of the functions of gov- 
ernment, promulged by courts, and adopted by 
successive administrations, the great ends which it 
ostensibly proposes, are Utopian and fanatical. The 
theory on which the present practice proceeds, is, not 
that governments are instituted among men to se- 
cure the blessings of impartial freedom, but that they 
are designed to set up privileges, as of one class 
against another ; to foster ohgarchies, and promote 
the interests of the few, at the expense of the 
many. If these be the true ends of government, 



14 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

then were our fathers mistaken in all their political 
and social theories. Then has it been reserved for 
the men of this generation to correct the errors, 
both of theory and administration, into which the 
Fathers were betrayed, in projecting and setting 
in motion the machinery of Government. On the 
other hand, if these be not the true ends of gov- 
ernment ; if the larger and more humane concep- 
tions of the Fathers were just, we are recreant to 
then' principles, while professing to venerate their 
names, and to love them for their works' sake. 

The truth is, we have corrupted the noble and 
humane institutes of government which the fathers 
of the republic set up. We have perverted what 
they intended should enure to the benefit of the. 
weak, to the strengthening of the strong against 
the weak. We have used what they fondly hoped 
would work out the deliverance of the oppressed, 
for the benefit of the oppressor. We have reversed 
the engine Avhich they gave a progressive motion, 
with a view to the redress of wrong, and the ele- 
vation of the lowly ; turning it back, with crushing 
power, on the very persons whom it was meant to 
establish in freedom, and the paths of a self-direct- 
ing industry and competence. So thoroughly have 
we come to repudiate the principles of the men 
whom we pretend to venerate. We build costly 
sepulchres over their dead remains, but shamelessly 
scout their living principles. It may be said of us, 
as it was said of certain men of old : " Hath a 
nation changed their gods, which are no gods ? but 
this people have change.d their glory for that which 
doth not profit." * 



HI. Consider, in the third place, how fully we 
have come under the law of subterfuge, and the 
extent to which our people have been in the habit 

* Jer. 2 : 11. 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 15 

of promoting wrong, in the name of right ; mak- 
ing abstract theories of freedom pretexts for the 
exercise of a real oppression. To outrage justice 
in the name of justice, is no novelty in the history 
of mankind. The Jews of our Lord's day pre- 
tended to be guided by the lights of prophecy, in 
their rejection and abuse of him who was the end 
of all prophecy. They invoked the prophets in 
confirmation of their falsehood, and perverted the 
law to sanctify their injustice ; seizing the author 
of the law, in the name of the law. And like 
these Jews we are clamorous in our appeal to the 
Fathers, without any respect for their true mean- 
ing. We have the audacity to bring the dead to 
witness against the living, though both speak 
under the same inspiration, and proclaim the same 
evangel. The Jew talked of the prophets, but 
knew not the prophecy ; so we appeal to the glori- 
ous defenders of freedom, but know not the spirit 
that was in them. We are consciously false and 
mercenary in the pleas by which we justify our 
public acts. We enlarge our territorial posses- 
sions, professedly to " extend the area of freedom ; " 
but really to enlarge the field, and augment the 
influence of slavery. We pick a quarrel with a 
weak and distracted neighboring nation, who never 
offended us in aught that was not justified by the 
encroachments of our own people on her rights, 
under the specious plea of securing a guaranty of 
future peace. We bombard defenceless hamlets, 
jeoparding the property and lives of unoffending 
people, in the interest of humanity. We encourage 
piratical expeditions against the territories and lib- 
erties of friendly States, under the pretense of 
giving them timely aid, and extending a needed 
protection. We open free territory to the inroads 
of chattel slavery, under the sanction of social and 
political equality. In the name of the people's 



16 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

right to shape their own domestic institutions, we 
connive at, if we do not abet, armed incm'sions on 
the part of one people, for the avowed pm*pose of 
shaping the domestic policy of another. We tol- 
erate mobs under the color of law, and let anarchy 
loose in the behoof of social order. It is appahing to 
contemplate the wrongs perpetrated by our people 
during the last fifteen years ; to recount the deeds 
of injustice, cruelty and bloodshed which they 
have deliberately wrought or sanctioned ; but one 
of the darkest features connected with these dis- 
mal transactions consists in the hollow, heartless, 
unmitigated hypocrisy, illustrated in the pretexts by 
which they have been either urged or defended. 
How appropriate to a case like this are the words 
of the prophet : " Our transgressions are multi- 
plied, and our sins testify against us ; for our 
transgressions are with us, and as for our sins we 
know them ; in transgressing and lying against the 
Lord, and departing away from our God, speaking 
oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering 
from the heart words of falsehood. And judg- 
ment is turned away backward, and justice standeth 
afar off: for truth has fallen in the street, and 
equity cannot enter. Yea truth faileth; and he 
that departed from evil, maketh himself a prey." * 
Speciousness and insincerity have come to be 
marked political vices of the time. Too many 
build the tombs of the prophets, not so much to 
honor the glorious men of old, as to secure a fac- 
titious influence for themselves. They ascend the 
altars of freedom for the sake of the elevation 
which they afford, and the light of distinction 
which their holy fire sheds around them ; not that 
they may minister to those high ends for which 
these altars are consecrated. The highest profes- 
sions of devotion to public interests, are too often 

*Isa. 59: 12-15. 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 17 

hollow and false. Many of our public men are 
more anxious to gain station, than to fill it well, 
They ofier inducements for the popular suffrage, 
which they take little pains to justify by their sub- 
sequent acts. They are not unfrequently guilty of 
perversions and malfeasance which belie their 
pledges, and which they attempt, sometimes, to 
justify on grounds insulting alike to the intelli- 
gence and conscience of those whom they have 
deceived and betrayed. Personal interest, or party 
expediency, is allowed to turn them from the path 
of duty, leading them to the sacrifice of their 
professed principles. The remarkable warlike ful- 
minations recently uttered in our national Congress, 
by men who should have been deterred from such 
contemptible clamor, not less by the reason and 
equity of the case, than by the convictions and 
interests of their constituents, may be cited as an 
instance in point. No one seriously believes that 
there was the least public necessity for vsuch demon- 
strations. The inspiration of these things must be 
sought in party, not in patriotism. The peace of 
the world involves concerns too high and sacred to 
be recklessly jeoparded for the sake of any per- 
sonal or party interests whatever ; and all such 
movements involve the perversion of holy things, 
to uses base and unworthy. It is so much the 
custom of our public men to look one way and 
row another ; to start false issues before the peo- 
ple, for the purpose of covering their real designs, 
that we are often compelled to look with suspicion 
on those whom we are really anxious to honor with 
our confidence. But we must be careful not to be 
too indiscriminate and severe in our censures on 
such courses. We, the people, are far from guilt- 
less in this matter. If we encourage men to resort 
to tortuous courses, for the promotion of interests 
wliich we cherish, why should we be surprised to 
2^ 



18 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

find this tortuousness sometimes leading them 
athwart those interests ? If we assume to bribe 
men to the performance of what is right, we ought 
to remember that there is a closer and stronger 
afhnity between bribery and wrong. If New Eng- 
land will buy tariffs with manufacturing capital, 
why should not Presidents buy repeals of slavery 
restrictions, and endorsements of Lecompton Con- 
stitutions, with government patronage ? The 
present evils of our political condition have not 
sprung altogether from the pursuit and compass- 
ing of wrong ends ; the attempt to attain good 
ends by wrong means, has been quite as active in 
producing them. A wrong act may be reversed, 
and its pernicious tendencies thus be checked ; but 
that deviousness of heart which leads to the seeking 
of a good end by dishonest ways, betrays a deeper 
and more pregnant evil. The real disease of the 
body politic is in that hollowness which resorts to 
subterfuge on the one hand, and accepts it on the 
other ; not in the temporary misdirection of our 
material interests. Your public servants may com- 
mit great wrongs, like the revocation of the Mis- 
souri restriction ; but such acts would be harmless 
if the people had the intelligence to sift, or the 
virtue to scout, the impudent sophistries by which 
they may be excused or justified. The trouble is, 
when the wrong is done, you have not the moral 
integrity to resist it. You assume to be satisfied 
by reasons which never, for a moment, have 
imposed on your judgment; while conscience has 
been stifled by the. swelling floods of party passion, 
or the din of party strife. We offer a premium for 
craft, chicanery, and wrong in the management of 
our political atfairs. If constituencies were less 
susceptible to cajolery and deception, there would 
be fewer betrayals of truth and justice in high sta- 
tions. The people do, in reality, give shape to our 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OP THE TROPHETS. 19 

public policy ; if that policy be tortuous, it is 
because the public heart is full of all subtlety and 
deceivableness. 

IV. I pass now to note one more view sug- 
gested by the text ; namely, that the condition in- 
volved in the charge brought by our Lord against the 
Jews, is one of national weakness and social decay. 
"When communities move only by indirection, and 
speak only to utter guile, their dissolution must be 
regarded as inevitable and speedy. When the 
Jews had reached the pitch of hypocrisy reproved 
in the text, they .were ripe for destruction. Having 
rejected and crucified the Son of God, though pre- 
tending to deprecate the guilt of their fathers in 
killing the prophets, they were given over to the 
sword and torch of the spoiler. The integrity of 
the national conscience was sfone. Their social 
vitality, consisting of soundness of heart, had 
died cut. False in principle, corrupt in manners, 
hollow in profession, and malignant in feeling, 
there was scarcely any thing left for them to lose. 
They were hopelessly corrupt ; and corruption is 
always weakness. The life-element of their social 
fabric was absorbed and eaten away. They fell, 
not because they were weak in material power, 
but because they were morally perverse, and hypo- 
critical. 

In like manner, must any nation perish if it 
reject the seminal principles of its public polity, 
becoming hollow in profession, and treacherous 
in action. This is the lesson of history. The 
old republics fell, not because they w^ere physically 
weak, not for lack of sages and statesmen, not 
because they were defective in Art, Literature, or 
Law ; but because the people were corrupt, false, 
and selfish. Rome never was so great in all the 
elements of material grandeur and power, as at 



20 BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 

the time when her nationality received its death 
blow. She was overcome, not by those northern 
hordes which swept, like avalanches, over her 
plains, but by her own intestine fraud, oppression, 
and luxury. Her material resources were never 
more abundant. Her territories teemed with men ; 
her wealth was imperial ; her skill was, at least, 
equal to any former period, and she was perfecting 
a code of laws which has ever since been regarded 
as the most perfect system of civil jurisprudence 
instituted by men. But the people had lost the 
ancient love of liberty. Power was used to ag- 
grandize the state, not to protect the citizen. The 
spirit of the laws lived not in the hearts and con- 
sciences of the people. All orders of the state 
had become effeminate in spirit, pleasure-seeking 
and venial. The foundations of the common- 
wealth were undermined by domestic vice and 
social corruptions. Rome fell because virtue had 
ceased to be a quality of Romans. 

The examples of History should not only in- 
struct, they should also warn us. The processes 
of national growth, and the causes of national 
decline, are essentially the same the world over, 
and in all time. What has happened to a given 
nation, may happen to us, under like conditions. 
Though we have sought to assure ourselves of a 
happier destiny, in view of the higher intelligence 
of our people, the more perfect forms of our con- 
stitutions and laws, and our purer and more vital 
religious faith ; yet if, in spite of these things, our 
social life is characterized by the same vices which 
marked these ancient states, our fate will be simi- 
lar to theirs. The ground of our prosperity must 
be in ourselves, and not in any external advan- 
tages. We must be humane, liberty -loving, just, 
industrious, reasonable, fearing God and regard- 
ing man. Constitutions give no vitality to na- 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 21 

tions ; laws give no validity to rights. These, at 
the most, only crystallize the spirit and ideas of a 
people. Aside from their hold on the judgment 
and conscience of the people, they arc only empty 
forms. The only force of law is in its embodi- 
ment of truth and right. Freedom and justice 
are the informing elements of all popular institu- 
tions. When these have died out of the popular 
heart, your constitution is worth no more than a 
piece of blank parchment; it becomes a husk 
without a kernel, a body without an animating 
spirit. 

And here is our danger. We appeal to consti- 
tutions, instead of resting on the great and impre- 
scriptible rights of the people. As the Jews quoted 
the prophets against Christ, we quote the Constitu- 
tion against man. We are coming to love power 
more than liberty. We begin to revere our sub- 
lime fathers, more for their heroic deeds, than for 
their just and humane principles. We exalt the 
qualities of courage and fortitude, overlooking the 
love of freedom for themselves and their posterity, 
which inspired them. Our love for the fathers is 
traditional, not vital. We seem to have forgotten 
that impartial freedom was the soul, alike of the 
deeds they wrought, the words they spoke, and the 
institutions they formed. Else we should not 
contemn the living champions of liberty. Else 
we should respond to every word which denounces 
oppression, opposes social WTong, and calls the 
downtrodden to freedom. If we really venerated 
our revolutionary heroes, for the spirit which guided 
them in council, and nerved them in battle ; if we 
loved the dead prophets for the noble truths which 
they proclaimed, we should not only treasure their 
words, but listen with attention to the eloquent 
voices which reecho them to our own age. But 
the truth is, our national life has become superii- 



22 BUILDING THE TOMBS OP THE PROPHETS. 

cial. Our political integrity has sadly declined. 
We have ceased to love liberty for its own sake. 
The rights of humanity are no longer sacred in 
our eyes. We magnify constitutions, but degrade 
man. We insist on the sacredness of law, but 
fail to maintain the inviolableness of personal 
freedom. We give heed to the form, overlooking 
the reality, forgetting that Humanity is the only 
substantive thing. Constitutions may crumble to 
dust, laws may become obsolete, and governments 
may sink into decay ; but Humanity remains, in 
the integrity of its substance, and the dreadness 
of its responsibility. And shall the permanent 
give place to the transient and accidental ? It is 
possible that existing institutions of government 
may not be ultimate and final. These may all be 
swept away, in some new and more glorious upris- 
ing of Humanity: but, from the social forces inher- 
ing in itself, shall spring other institutions, fresher 
in their life, and more glorious in their fruits. 

This very day Virginia receives to its last rest, 
the body of James Monroe, fifth President of the 
United States, and fourth of her noble sons who 
filled that high station, having just reclaimed it 
from the foreign sepulchre, where it has reposed 
nearly thirty years. This is well. Let her gather 
the remains of her children to the generous soil 
which gave them birth. But alas for her, and for 
us all, if their mute ashes be all that she consent to 
receive ! Mother of Presidents ! take bacli to thy 
bosom not alone the lifeless forms of thy noble sons, 
but also the inspiration of their living principles, and 
the impulse of their heroic example. Stand up again 
for the truths which they asserted, and for the rights 
which they maintained. Garnish the tombs of 
your dead worthies ; but be more intent to imbibe 
their spirit, and follow their sublime aims, which 
were generous as freedom, and wide as the world. 



BUILDING THE TOMBS OF THE PROPHETS. 23 

Then shall a new fruitfuhiess restore thy wastes, 
and the glories of a better age reinvest thy queenly 
brow. Then shalt thou be lirst again, in this aug- 
menting band of states, to sound the battle charge 
of freedom, and first to strike that note of victory 
which humanity, disenthralled and crowned with 
the blessings of rational liberty and Christian 
hope, shall lift responsive to the angel song of 
Bethlehem — " Glory to God in the highest, and 
on earth peace, good will toward men I " 

Let all the States composing this great and 
united America, remember that the statues of 
heroes and sages, and the monuments crowning 
our battle-fields, will become a national reproach, 
when the spirit which animated the Fathers of the 
Republic, and the principles which they staked in 
the revolutionary conflict, shall have been lost or 
denied ; that the memorials of their glory will then 
stand only as the witnesses of our shame. Let 
us all remember that the fittest commemoration 
of their great deeds and living principles, is to 
make their work perpetual, through the intelli- 
gence, freedom, prosperity and virtue of the whole 
people. Then shall their names shine as stars in 
the ever-brightening firmament of a common- 
wealth, which shall invest the interests and desti- 
nies of a happy and hopeful race, till the clear ris- 
ing of the Sun of Kighteousness shall scatter all 
the dimness and distortions of our night, and bring 
in the serener glories of the Millennial Day. 



LIBRPRY OF CONGRESS 




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CONGRESS 




